This year’s RISC OS London Show is going to be the biggest yet and is not to be missed!

Just a few of the things to look forward to are:

- R-Comp with the ARMX6 and 4K displays
- CJE’s as-yet-unnamed Cortex-A15 machine
- ROOL with OS and documentation updates
- The latest beta of Impression-X
- A new 3D isometric quest game, Legends of Magic, from Amcog Games
- New issues of Archive and Drag n Drop magazines
- Riscy Robots from Neil Fazakerley
- The latest releases of RiscOSM, Organizer, RPCemu, Basalt, and more
- Send Tweets using a BBC Micro, with a bit of help from a Pi
- Retro games arcade – bring your (grand)children!

Plus the Acorn and BBC User Group will be making the trip south to bring along a selection of the amazing stuff they have been up to with their Acorn Atoms, Beebs, Electrons and Archies.

Sine Nomine Software will be releasing an update to RiscOSM at the show. One of the new features is a key to the map which also allows you to customise what is shown on the map. There are various enhancements relating to photographs, including displaying thumbnails in a new photo panel. A new helper application allows users to search for places and addresses anywhere in the world via an online database.

We have also made some improvements to the speed of loading the data and rendering the maps.

We will have freshly converted map data (including an update to the British postcodes) available at the show, covering most of Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australasia. Come to the talk in the show theatre to see the enhancements to the software or drop in at the stand.

Titanium comes with Sata support. Good. But will there is a dual head support (even limited to similar resolutions). To be hones, I missed this Iyonix pc’ functionality. For me, it’s the difference between buying it and not buying it :)

Just on the way back from the London Show. I didn’t really see very much of the show because people kept talking to me at the Sine Nomine Software stand! It was encouraging to meet so many users who are enjoying using RiscOSM — there was also a chap who was amazed that the Impact database was still supported and developed, as he had used it a lot up till about 2003 when he had left the platform and thought it knocked the spots off most other database systems he’d used.

I did get along to the ROOL stand where Ben was happy to let me try loading RiscOSM on the new Titanium board. It installed fine and I was told later that there was an appreciable speed increase over any other platform it has been run on. The ArtWorks apple is so fast these days that RiscOSM is becoming something of a new benchmark.

There were quite a lot of retro stands with BBC B games, and I think a small Econet network. There were some interesting looking robotics being demonstrated on one table but I did not stay long enough to find out what was controlling them. Had a good chat to a few other developers. I’ve no idea what was said in any of the theatre talks, apart from mine!

Some more thoughts on the new board. Not knowing the terminology (ATX, mini-ATX etc.) I was surprised by how big the board is. The great advantage, of course, is that it fits in a proper case without any messing around with internal USB hubs, extension leads and other nastiness. I have had trouble with some previous boards (e.g. Panda) with peripherals not being reliable and there is always this nagging concern about whether the power supply can cope properly, and whether the USB peripherals will be supported properly. For example, only yesterday I had a difficulty with a fairly new RISC OS machine sold as a bundled working system, where it failed to write to an SD card. It was cured by plugging the keyboard into a different socket. That’s not good, but I imagine having six on-board USB sockets on Titanium will help immensely there.

We have got so used to these relatively cheap development boards (Beagle, Panda, Raspberry Pi) where there are sockets on almost every side of the PCB, but they are a pain to put in a case! On the other hand, I do like our Beagleboard (my machine of choice when exhibiting at the show by train) with its perspex case and absolutely silent operation. Some PSUs can be very noisy, and the silent fan-less, small form-factor machine is very attractive.

My ideal machine would have no fans, fairly small form-factor, on-board SATA and at least 6 on-board USB sockets available direct from the outside of the case. And Gb ethernet. External PSU would be fine. And I’d like a machine which did not come with warnings about risk of damaging it if you plug in the HDMI cable while it is powered up. Working CD/DVD writer would be good too.

But you can’t always get the ideal machine, and there are a lot of very good things with this Titanium board so being fussy just because it’s bigger than a Beagleboard is not really reasonable!

By the way, anyone know of a PostScript compatible colour printer (laser or inkjet) that has a wired network connection, can print A3 paper and 180gsm card and doesn’t cost the earth? That would be my ideal printer but I don’t think it exists.

An exciting show again! The first well kept secret was a wholly new Cortex-A15 circuit board, christened Titanium, from Cambridge-based Elesar Ltd., designed with RISC OS in mind. This was on show on the ROOL stand and appeared fully functional, including a SATA-connected solid state disc controlled by ADFS, proudly demonstrated by Ben Avison. A handout was available describing the new board.

The operating system ROM for this computer has been licensed under the least restrictive Castle licence which means that a month after the circuit boards go on sale in November, the ROM should shortly afterwards be available for download from the ROOL site. This is different from the CJE-sponsored IGEPv5 and the R-Comp sponsored ARMX6 operating system ROMS which have a 2-year Castle licence.

See the coloured flyer for more details. ROOL were also selling the updated DDE tools for £25 or £50 depending on how recently you purchased the last version.

CJE Micros were first on in the theatre and started the talk by saying that they hoped to update TableMate when they get the sources. They had a ’black box; for sale that could take the video output from older computers (e.g. RGB) and convert it to modern monitor requirements (e.g. DVI) and had some 4-way USB/HDMI/audio KVMs for just under £100.

They had the official Pi touch screen 800×480 display for sale, although RISC OS did not yet support touch screen and a MultiComp (CPC/Farnell) case which would enclose a Pi plus touch screen.

These were mere diversions from the announcement of the forthcoming Titanium: he showed a bare unpopulated PCB and explained that this was the first board to have unrestricted gigabit ethernet, that on the Iyonix, ARMX6 and IGEPv5 all being bounded by 480Mbps due to their USB-based connection and were also (principally) bounded by RISC OS’s capability to drive the hardware. The circuit board was large and would need a standard size ITX case and power supply.

The IGEPv5 was now finished (and named ‘RapidO Ig PC’) and on sale, the SATA driver having just been finished (he hoped that an updated ROM including an ADFS-based SATA driver would be available in about a month, he explained how simple it would be to change the fitted SSD drive to work via ADFS/SATA rather than USB/SATA).

Software to read the machine temperature and to switch to low speed at a user-set threshold temperature was being worked on. Hardware floating point NEON/VFP was now available and some software was starting to use it. The laptop machine was still under development.

The ‘PiTop’ was now commercially available and he hoped to be able to ship this to end users in December. It used four batteries in parallel and gave about 12 hours battery life with a Pi model 2 installed (as the Compute Module was still based on the model 1). The machine was a tasteful shade of green.

Richard Keefe was taking money from those who had subscribed to the Impression update scheme as the third (of four) update was about to be issued, allowing jpeg files to be loaded directly into Impression via an ‘ArtWorks’ loader. He was expecting the fourth update to be issued before the South West show so that subscriptions would be likely to run out before then if not renewed.

Adrian Lees was showing an updated Aemulor although it was not yet released. His plan was to make the next update a paid-for update ‘Aemulor Ultimate’ to be available for all platforms with the full functionality of Aemulor and Aemulor Pro so that this distinction would disappear.

R-Comp was second on in the theatre saying it had been a busy year. The ARMX6 had been announced 12 months ago and had been delivered on schedule with working SCSIFS-based SATA. It had been improved so that 1920×1200 had now been extended to 2560×1440 and 3440×1440, both of which were being demonstrated on the stand.

RS232 had now been implemented and an operating system upgrade now allowed ‘pooled’ memory so that a 500Mbyte RAM disc was perfectly feasible. Key software applications such as !PDF and video were now accelerated through hardware floating point. ARMiniX users had not been left behind as an operating system upgrade had been issed this week.

Fireworks Pro 2 – a major upgrade – was now able to save in Microsoft Excel format and was now open document compliant. Multi-sheet import was now supported. NetFetch 4 was also a significant update and can now work in background mode.

PiFi software had been updated and can now memorise multiple wireless networks. Delegate had also been updated and could now protect external disc such as network-connected drives. A CD collection of !Store downloads was available at a bargain show price and included the Otter browser – based on the WebKit (which uses the same ‘back end’ as used in Chrome and Safari).

QT is a cross-platform library which in its complete form included WEbKit and QT has now been ported to RISC OS. The Otter browser therefore looked slightly quirky but works well.

In response to a question, Andrew said that it had not been possible to talk about the Titanium machine until last week as its existence was subject to a NDA until then. He said that it was likely to be expensive but had been ‘designed within the RISC OS community’. In most areas it performed better than IGEPv5 and ARMX6 but video capability of the Titanium would not stretch to 4k display. Taking price and performance into account, he felt the ARMX6 would remain a better choice for most users.

RiscOSM were selling an update to version 1.29 but I missed their theatre presentation so someone will have to fill in the details. RiscOSM is an excellent product and extremely good value for money.

Soft Rock Software were selling an updated case for the Pi based on the Risc PC theme. It now fits both model 1 and model 2 Pi.

ROOL had the third slot in the theatre. Steve Revill noted that the Titanium circuit board would be on sale in November, with CJE and R-Comp having expressed interest as retailers. There was a detailed news article on the ROOL site about the Titanium board. There had been a long overdue updating of documentation such as DDE manual.

He described the role of ROOL since 2006 (when RISC OS was closed source and controlled by a near end-of-life company) to make it open source. Nine years on the goals had been met, including both the reasonable and ‘stretch’ targets.

He introduced Paul Fellows to speak about ‘Project Arthur and the origins of RISC OS’.

Paul recalled that the project had started in September 1985 but outlined some of the developments prior to this: ‘Project C’ had become the BBC Master computer and reference was made to the ‘graphics extension rom’ – a little research made it clear that this didn’t exist and so the first task was to write it into the operating system for the Master!

The first ARM chips were a mere 25000 transistors using 3000nm technology running at 6.6MHz – a huge step forward in 1985 (a modern Pentium chip has 1.2 billion transistors). The A500 was the first stand-alone machine (which used so little power that the processor remained running after switch off for about 30 seconds as the mini-cooling fan ran down, making it difficult to reboot until you stopped the fan)!

He explained how some of the things we take for granted had happeneed, such as co-operative multi-tasking and paging applications in and out of memory so that each thinks they are alone in control.